On Friday, a small plane cruised for hours after its pilots apparently lost consciousness.

Air traffic controllers lost contact with a Socata TBM-700 carrying a prominent Rochester, N.Y. couple from their hometown to Naples, Fla. The single-engine turboprop went off course around an hour into its flight, shortly after a pilot requested permission to descend from above 25,000 feet to 18,000 feet due to an unspecified problem.

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That was the last anyone heard from the plane. Fighter jets dispatched to follow the plane got close enough to spot someone slumping over at the controls and frost on the windows—signs of cabin depressurization. But there was nothing they could do. The plane ultimately plunged into the waters off Jamaica.

These "zombie plane" episodes are rare, but not unheard of. And if you were wondering whether there's anything we could do in these situations other than sending military jets on a wild goose chase, the answer is yes. We just might not be able to pay for it—and it might not do much good.

In fact, technology exists today that could allow personnel on the ground take control of an aircraft that has lost all contact, says John Goglia, former National Transportation Safety Board member. The prospects for this kind of system gained some traction directly after 9/11, when America wanted to do anything to prevent terrorists from ever taking control of another aircraft. And pilots can be suddenly incapacitated for a number of reasons, from heart attacks to hijackings. A backup system would ensure, at the very least, that an unguided plane wouldn't crash into a populated area.

"We have the technology to do that today, to build it into airplanes," Goglia says. The military is using it right now in drones. If an unmanned aircraft loses contact with controllers, it can be steered back to home base. But that technology has not come to general aviation or commercial airliners, he says, because "the will isn't there to do it."

For one thing, he says, given the rarity of these kinds of accidents in commercial airliners, the industry would balk at the high cost. The other concern, he says: "What if you're hacked?" When Iran captured a U.S. drone back in 2011, it was suspected that someone had hacked into the controls.

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There's one other problem: Remote control might not be enough to save the people on board. In situations of depressurization, survival depends on a crew's swift response. Landing via remote control wouldn't happen soon enough to save the occupants of an oxygen-deprived plane.

"Consciousness can be lost in a matter of seconds" due to hypoxia, says Patrick Smith, pilot and author of Cockpit Confidential. "[Crews] are trained to don their oxygen masks immediately following a loss of cabin pressure, before any troubleshooting begins."

Pressurization can be lost for any number of reasons, including an explosion, a mechanical failure, or a pilot error such as incorrectly setting the cabin pressure controls. A slow leak through the window seals or other gap can lead to catastrophe. The problem is that in some of these situations the crew might not realize what's wrong until it's too late to react.

Depressurization is usually suspected in these kinds of cases. It was behind one of the most prominent ghost plane episodes in 1999, when golfer Payne Stewart and five others died when their Learjet flew for nearly four hours after the pilot became incapacitated, finally running out of fuel and crashing in a field in South Dakota. And the mystery of how MH 370 continued to fly incommunicado for about seven hours after it went off the grid this past raises the possibility of a similar scenario, albeit on a far larger scale.

As for the TBM-700 lost on Friday, Goglia says that much will remain unknown unless the wreckage can be recovered from the depths. The plane's remains sunk under 6,000 feet of water; a team of French investigators is reportedly en route to the scene. It is still not clear exactly who was on the plane. The owners, Larry and Jane Glazer, were both licensed pilots and one of them may have been at the controls. There have been conflicting reports on whether a third person was onboard.

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